An insightful look into the wrong doings of movie trailers...
Most recently came the trailer of Terminator: Genisys, the newest and hopefully last (although probably not last) film in the Terminator franchise, notable for spoiling the film's most pivotal plot points, to the point where even the director Alan Taylor stepped in to say that the "marketing gave it all away".
The Terminator franchise is no stranger to spoilers in it's marketing: the previous entry, Salvation, also suffered a similar fate, detailing a twist pertaining towards the lead role.
These two examples and the many other examples out there stand as the reason as to why directors should be able to dictate what plot points should and should not be used for marketing. Guidelines as the video above suggests, per say.
When entire plots aren't being given away, there's the formulaic and repetitive structure that trailers seem to follow. Don LaFontaine during his lifetime cemented himself as the quintessential movie trailer voice-over, and you'll be hard pressed to find yourself a person who hasn't had the phrase "In a world..." burned into their brains. A film has had that phrase dedicated to its title. That pretty much explains it all.
Back on to the titular topic at hand, it is an issue that's occurred in trailers from their inception, with a very simple solution, yet it's never been addressed. For one - these films still do good business regardless of their marketing, not to use the recent Terminator films as a scapegoat but they both made and are currently making money hand over fist. That serves as an incentive for the marketing departments to continue as usual, as there are no negative effects to the process. There may be complaints, but the vast majority of viewers voting with their wallets are still opting to go see the movie anyway.
It's a fine balance that needs to be achieved, show enough for an audience to gain interest, but not too much so as to deter the audience, in theory. Then there's ridiculous practices such as one The Amazing Spider-Man 2 employed: watch the first 10 minutes of the film. It is the laziest and silliest marketing practice possible short of releasing the whole movie for free. So when you do go and see the film, you can just sit and let your mind go numb for the first 10 minutes whilst you wait for the boredom to pass and get on with the parts that you haven't seen. There's spoiling a scene, then there's spoiling an entire chapter.
After you've thought that I've lost focus, I pose a few points, some of which are in common with the video most nearest to the top. Restrict the length of trailers, don't give yourself the chance to give too much away. Provide a guideline that allows directors to choose which specific scenes or timecodes that cannot be altered and for the love of god, don't release the first 10 to 20 minutes of the film and call it an "extended preview" or even for that matter "good marketing".
Behold! How not to "market" your film!
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